House lights off Actinics on for night photography?

[Casperson]

Hi All,
I'm trying to take full aquarium display shots in the dark
Just my night time actinics on. Using the flash brightens the picture up way to much.
Can't seem to find the right shutter speed and aperture?
Anyone tell me how I can do this?

Thanks,

Tom C.

 

[gregr]

Hi Tom-
What camera are you using? Do you have a tripod?
Greg

 

[Casperson]

Hi Greg,
I have Nikon D50, and yes I have a tripod.

Tom

 

[gregr]

Great. There's more than one way to go about this but the first thing I'd try is putting the camera in aperture priority and setting the aperture to f5.6 or f8 or thereabouts. The shutter speed is going to be very long, hence the tripod. When you have the camera set up on the tripod and your aperture set, press the shutter release button halfway and look in the viewfinder to check the shutter speed. If it's flashing '30' that means the shutter speed is going to be longer than 30 seconds (aka 'bulb' exposure) and we want to avoid that. So if you get the flashing 30 use a bigger aperture- like f4 or f2.8 if your lens is that fast. If it still flashes 30 then set the iso to a higher setting, but probably not higher than 400 or 800 because the picture will be very grainy.
You might want to set the seft-timer to a two second delay too. And if you really just want only the blue light then the house lights shouldn't be too bright. If you have the camera very close to the tank the house lights will matter a lot less.

 

[Casperson]

Greg,
Thanks so much!
I'll give it a shot,

Tom

 

[gregr]

You're welcome- if you can post some of the results I'd love to see em. And maybe we can make some recommendations on how to improve them... unless they're perfect of course